120 PER50NAL HI5TORY THE KLEMPER.ER. DIAR.IE5 For the twelve years that Hitler was in power, a Jewish academic kept a record of life in Dresden. The diaries, never published during the author's lifetime, offer an unprecedented picture of a city during the Third Reich-until it was firebombed by the Allies. Victor Klemperer was Jewish by birth, but he was not a typical Dres- den Jew. He converted to Protes- tantism, fought in the First World War, earning a Distinguished Ser- vice Medal, and married an 'Ylryan. " As a result, he was spared the fate if most if the city's Jewish population. Klemperer's wife, Eva, was a pi- anist by training, but her career took second place to her husband's work on the French Enlightenment. His di- aries mention other members if his family: his brother-in-law, Martin Sussmann, a doctor whose license was revoked when it was decreed that most Jews could no longer prac- tice medicine; his sister, Grete, who suffered a mental breakdown and died during the war; his brother, Georg, who emigrated to the United States in the mid-thirties. Why didn't Klemperer emigrate? In part because he believed that he was a German before anything else. Before he lost his job at Dresden Tech- nical College, in 1935, he and his wife began building a house in Dölzschen, a village just outside Dresden, where Klem- perer could work and Eva could tend the rose garden and fruit trees. The couple was reluctant to give up the house, and, by the time it was taken from them, it was no longer possible for them to leave Germany. Klemperer's diaries were not written for publication. As he explains, he is at- tempting not to write a "history" but simply to bear witness to "the everyday life if tyranny. " That, he says, is his heroism. When Klemperer died, in 1960, his widow gave his diaries to the Sächsische Landes- bibliothek in Dresden, where they remained BY VICTOR. KLEMPER.ER. .. .. ". . 1 ' .. .. . . And there's not a sound from anv- .I one, and everyone's keeping his head down, the Jewry most of all and its democratic press. On February 5th, one week after Hider's appointment, we were at the Blumenfelds'. Raab made a big speech and declared that it was necessary to vote for the Ger- man Nationals, so as to strength- en the right wing of the coalition. I vehemendy took issue with him. More interesting is his opinion that Hitler will end in religious madness. . . . What is strangest of all is how one is blind in the face of events, how no one has a clue to the real balance of power. " .. ,1S< . . ;; . ' y">" ;" ..j , ; f;. . . " MARCH 10TH: On January 30th, Hider became Chancellor. What, until the election on March 5th, I had called terror was a mild prelude. On Saturday the fourth, I heard part of Hider's speech from Königs- :" berg. The front of a hotel at the N ::;) railway station illuminated, a procession of torchbearers, swastika flagbearers on 8 '""'- the balconies, and loudspeakers. I under- stood only occasional words. But the tone! The unctuous bawling, true bawl- ing, of a priest. On Sunday I voted for the Demo- , crats, Eva for the Centrists. Then the tremendous election victory of the Na- tional Socialists. Their vote doubled in LLJ Bavaria. Directly afterward, the Cen- tral Association of Jewish Citizens in , e.:: Thuringia was banned because it had criticized the government in "Talmudic fashion." Day after day since then com- missioners have been appointed, provin- cial governments trampled underfoot, o >- (/) LLJ l- e.:: ::;) o u The Klemperers in the nineteen-thirties and, opposite, pages from the diary. "We have both been unceasingly tormented by the question 'Go or stay?'" Klemperer wrote in 1938. "To go too soon, to stay too late? To go where we have nothing, to remain in this corruption?" <'1 "'";.y. ' . . . : A' ' :' >", ,,," . i-" , ' " " 4 .''t . ^ -:. ; .-^ f. ' ,. ' .i..:).'. . . .ft .. . >, :.: '" . until the eighties, when a literary critic and admirer if Klemperer's work, Walter Nowojski, embarked on the task if tran- scribing the thousands if handwritten pages-from which this edited selection has been taken. 1933 F EBRUARY 21sT: For three weeks now, I've been depressed over the reactionary government. I am not writing a history: But I shall nevertheless record my embitterment, which is greater than I would have imagined I was still capable of feeling. It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes.